U.S.' World Champ Live on BBC – Schools Cambridge

MEAN MELIN (Eric Melin), broadcast live across the globe on BBC World News, waxes academic with a hotshot from Cambridge University. Melin, who actually read the professor’s recent paper before the interview, confronts its author for claiming that air guitar is “useless" (06:15). Melin then takes a couple eggheads to task when he asserts – in what academics are now calling the Melin Inversion – that not only can an air guitar transcend traditional instruments, but in fact a there guitar’s truest purpose is to be at once supportive of and subservient to the air guitar itself (and not the other way around). “The song that I mimed to” in the Air Guitar World Championships, says Melin, “I actually wrote that specifically for the air guitar . . . I put the music to work for the air guitar.”

After a lively debate, Professor Rink acquiesces, “that was a quote in the paper and I have to say it wasn’t accurate" (07:45).

Professor John Rink, D.Phil, is the author of six books, dozens of published articles and papers, and numerous chapters of the world’s leading English-language textbooks. He directs Cambridge University’s Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, a £2.1 million ($3.4 million) department that studies how music in performance takes shape over time.

Eric Melin is a dude who gets flown all over the world to play air guitar.